


The Body Burns Away

by Carrionflower



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Keith "Emotions Are Bullshit" Kogane, Largely an excuse to make Shiro cry because hurting my faves is what makes me powerful, M/M, Noble martyr Shiro, SHEITH - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 02:43:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7387357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrionflower/pseuds/Carrionflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>His arm was gone, replaced by inorganic machinery that clicked and whirred, but the physical memory of its loss remained burned into his nervous system. It translated as a haunting pain that spiked and ebbed but never fully receded, always constant like a needle digging into his brain.</i><br/> <br/>Shiro's coming apart at the seams and Keith is the only one that can see it happening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Body Burns Away

**Author's Note:**

> Deep in my shriveled heart, I believe that Shiro deserves to be happy, but. I mean. You know how it is.

It wasn’t until he was alone in the castle’s cavernous control bay that Shiro let himself fall apart.

Behind the pedestal where Allura usually stood, he doubled over and sank to his knees, pressing his forehead to the cool, polished floor. He could feel the rolling vibrations of the ship’s heart, the eternal engines that powered it, even and low like a great breathing beast.

The pain made him grit his teeth, squeeze his eyes shut, draw in shuddering breaths of his own.

 _Please,_ he begged, _make it stop._

His right arm felt twisted to its breaking point. He hammered his fist against the ground, metal striking metal, and the impact reverberated up his shoulder but it didn’t dull or distract from the agony. It had been throbbing almost every moment of every day for weeks now.

Phantom limb pain. His arm was gone, replaced by inorganic machinery that clicked and whirred, but the physical memory of its loss remained burned into his nervous system. It translated as a haunting pain that spiked and ebbed but never fully receded, always constant like a needle digging into his brain.

He woke up often in the middle of the night, wracked with bizarre pain that he couldn’t fix, pacing his quarters and cursing until eventually it subsided enough to let him pass out for a few restless hours. Sometimes it felt like a hot brand was being pressed to his flesh. Sometimes the scar tissue that lined the seam of his metal arm felt like it was shrinking, tightening, crushing the damaged tissue beneath. Sometimes it felt like his skin was being peeled away in slow, excruciating layers. Most of the time, it felt as though his fingers -- his human fingers, the ones no longer attached to his body -- were curled into a fist so tightly that his tendons would snap like rubber bands and delicate bones would splinter. He couldn’t release that fist, no matter how hard he tried.

Shiro felt the weight of it all: the flickering, half-remembered images, the nightmares, the nameless fear he couldn’t control. The jagged edge of his mental breaking point was close enough to touch, cracking seams already beginning to show.

He could handle pain. He had withstood torture. Shit, he’d spent a year in a Galra prison doing exactly that -- but there, he’d been able to retreat from it, hide in a dark corner of his mind. He’d been able to make himself disappear until it felt like he was outside his own body, looking on dispassionately at the broken soldier made to fight for his life in a coliseum that smelled like old blood.

But now, with a team of paladins counting on him, the hope in their eyes weighing heavy like a yoke, he didn’t have the luxury of disappearing. What the paladins stood for was bigger than each of them individually. In the face of that enormity, Shiro’s suffering was an irrelevant distraction.

The other paladins knew by now, of course. Shiro kept himself tightly controlled in front of them, but it was hard to keep secrets when they were in their lions and they could sense each other’s substance. Shiro felt Lance’s giddiness, Hunk’s determination; he could hear the cogs constantly clicking in Pidge’s brain.

He felt Keith’s heat, burning unstoppable like a molten core, and the firework flare of his anger. He saw the heavy misery that Keith carried inside him. Shiro recognized that emptiness. He carried it, too.

 _I’m fine,_ Shiro reassured them. _Every once in awhile, I get these little muscle spasms. It passes quickly. I’m fine. But what about you? Are you getting enough sleep? Come on. Let’s get you fed._

His team didn’t push it; they left him alone. He didn’t know if he was relieved.

_I’m fine._

“Please,” he whispered again, knees aching on the unforgiving floor, clutching his arm to his chest. It hurt. So much. He needed it to stop, just for a minute, or he was going to break apart at the center, and he couldn’t -- he couldn’t let that happen. He didn’t have that choice, not anymore.

The castle rumbled beneath him. Another wave of pain crested and broke, and he clenched his teeth so hard his jaw cracked. Each severed nerve in his dead arm sparked like an overcharged battery.

_Stop it._

_Stop it, Shiro. You’re not helpless._

He pulled in an uneven breath through his nose. His eyelashes were wet. Humiliation hit him like a fist in his gut.

_Stand up. You should be ashamed. You think your team would respect you if they saw you like this, lying on the ground and sniveling like a goddamn child? Get on your fucking feet, soldier._

He could survive this. He _would_ survive it. He’d do it alone, the way he always had. And he’d use his hand, this unwanted gift, to crack open Zarkon’s ribs and crush his heart in a gleaming metal palm. What color was Galra blood? A part of Shiro, quivering with deeply-buried feral rage, looked forward to finding out.

Leaning his weight on his good arm, he pushed upright and gathered his legs beneath him. He disgusted himself with his worthless self-pity.

 _You get no sick days. There is no time off. The universe doesn’t stop spinning because you feel sad._  

**_Stand._ **

**_Up._ **

With a keening whine, he stumbled to his feet. Cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck and into the collar of his pressure suit. He pushed the pain down.

From behind him, the bay doors sighed open and a column of diffuse light spread across the floor. Shiro whirled around so fast he made himself dizzy.

A silhouette darkened the doorway. “Wh-- Shiro?”

Keith.

“Yeah,” Shiro said, “it’s me.” His voice sounded like he’d been chewing gravel.

“Man, do you _ever_ sleep?”

Shiro shrugged with one shoulder, dug out a weak smile. “Don’t need to. My body is a well-oiled machine.” His shitty joke fell flat.

Keith stepped out of the doorway into the room, and the glow from the main control console lit the shadows of his face. One eyebrow was raised. “I’m pretty sure even _you’re_ not invincible.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Shiro said. There was an edge to his voice that he hadn’t meant to be there, and he scrubbed a palm across his face with a guttural sigh. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”

Keith lingered awkwardly for a moment. “Hey,” he mumbled after several heartbeats of silence, “let’s get out of here.”

Shiro stared at him.

“C’mon. We’ve been busting our asses every fucking day. If we’re not training, then we’re just watching the clock, holding our breath and waiting for the next crisis.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, setting his jaw defiantly. “I want to go somewhere. Not for a mission, not as a training exercise. Let’s just… _go._ Just for a little while. We’ll be back before anyone wakes up.”

“I don’t --” Shiro sighed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He was tired. He was so tired he felt it in every inch of his wrecked body. His arm burned. What if something happened at the castle, and they were gone? What if Shiro wasn’t there when his team needed him?

“You just seem like you could use a break,” Keith said. He rocked back on his heels and shrugged in nonchalance, but he sounded just as exhausted and frayed.

A little spark of recognition ignited in Shiro’s belly, cutting through the haze in his brain. _Keith_ needed him. Keith was asking for help, in his roundabout way.

They’d blown curfew a few times at the Garrison, sneaking twenty miles into town on a speeder that didn’t belong to them. More than once, Shiro’s reputation and spotless academic record were the only things that kept them from getting expelled. Unbidden, Shiro remembered Keith’s wide, reckless smile lit by grimy neon as they ambled along the street, knocking shoulders. Back when all they had to worry about were morning drills and room inspections.

By a fraction of an inch, Shiro felt his phantom fingers uncurl.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. Keith’s gaze flickered to his face. “Yeah… all right. Maybe a break wouldn’t be so bad.”

 

\---

 

The black lion was waiting, silent but expectant, like it had been counting down the minutes until Shiro arrived. It felt the knife-point of his pain as clearly as he did, he supposed. It sensed his restlessness, even when they were apart. It must have known he was coming.

“Hey, buddy,” Shiro murmured, reaching out to pat its foreleg with familiar affection. The machine dwarfed him; next to it, he looked as small as he felt.

It came to sudden life with a rumble, a deep sound like a purr that rattled in Shiro’s chest, and its massive jaws yawned open to beckon them both inside.

The cockpit was wider and taller than that of the other lions, and Keith trailed his hand along the polished metal interior as Shiro swung himself with practiced ease into the pilot’s seat.

“It's warm,” Keith said, a note of marvel in his voice. “The metal -- it's warm to the touch. Red’s like that, too; I always wonder why. I mean, obviously there’s technology here too complex for us to understand, but… I wonder how much of it is _alive,_ you know?”

Keith glanced over his shoulder, mouth a flat line, as if he was waiting for Shiro to make fun of him for such a ridiculous statement, but Shiro only shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he admitted slowly. “Hell, I don’t think even Allura really knows. Anyone that could tell us has probably been dead for ten thousand years.”

He watched Keith run curious fingers over his lion. It felt intimate, almost vulnerable, having someone else in the cockpit with him. He’d only ever been alone in here before, and the space felt suddenly, inexplicably small. And yet as Keith grinned at him, the gnarled twist of phantom muscles in his arm began to unbraid themselves. The relief was incremental but it was immediate, and Shiro let the outline of his body loosen, let himself settle deeper into the pilot’s seat.

Keith slung an arm around the back of the chair and leaned over his shoulder to peer more closely at the glassy surface of his console. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Shiro snorted, shooting him a reproachful look.

“Oh, right, sorry.” Keith raised a hand in a lazy salute. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, _sir._ ”

Despite its hulking size, the black lion flew more smoothly than anything Shiro had ever experienced before. It was a thrill every time, and he expected the novelty would never wear thin -- that first rush of breathless joy as the lion pushed powerfully off the ground and soared into the air would last for the rest of his life. Keith felt it too: his grip on the back of Shiro’s chair tightened, and he leaned in closer, dark eyes wild. Shiro gunned the thrusters and flew into the clouds, feeling weightless.

“Where to?” he asked Keith, letting the lion drift aimlessly, floating in gentle loops. The whole world of Arus unfurled before them like a carpet laid out for arriving royalty. In the darkness, Shiro saw the distant flicker of firelight in faraway villages, settling down for sleep; he saw the thick canopy of trees and the white points of snow-capped mountains and the gleam of the calm ocean.

“Anywhere but here,” Keith said.

Shiro laughed, a low sound. “You got it.”

 

\---

 

The water lapping at its banks sounded like rhythmic sighs, and beneath its surface darted schools of tiny bioluminescent fish. Shiro had landed right at the tree line alongside a scar of black sand that led out to the ocean. When they’d both clambered out of the cockpit, Keith hauled himself up and flopped down cross-legged on the lion’s broad snout, waiting for Shiro to join him.

For a while, they didn’t speak. Softly, the wilderness hummed with unfamiliar noise, nocturnal creatures chittering.

“It hurts?” Keith asked.

Shiro grunted noncommittally and rolled his neck on his shoulders, rubbing at a thick knot of muscle. “Sometimes.”

“How often is _sometimes_?”

At night, the temperature on Arus dropped sharply. It was coldest in the pre-dawn hours, and Shiro could see the cloudy plumes of his breath as the edge of the horizon began to lighten.

He had been trying for weeks to map each of the foreign constellations of stars that pockmarked the sky over Arus, and Allura had taught him some of the names -- names he couldn’t pronounce, written in a dead alphabet he couldn’t read.

 _That one looks almost like a lion,_ he thought, his face turned away from Keith and his eyes tracing each tiny point of light.

“Shiro.”

Keith sounded tired.

“I’m fine,” Shiro said sharply.

“You’re a shitty liar.” Sprawled on his back with his arms crossed behind his head, Keith exhaled a sigh that curled up into the cold air like smoke. “You’ve always been a shitty liar. I mean, even _I_ can tell when you’re lying, and I’m worse at it than you are.”

It was true. Keith was incapable of playing his cards close to his chest. No poker face, no guile. His temper ran too hot for that, ignited too quickly. Shiro bowed his head and smiled, remembering the way Keith’s brusque, unwelcome honesty used to irritate him when they first met at the Galaxy Garrison.

_Cadet Kogane._

Those memories were a lifetime away.

“I made fun of your hair,” Shiro said, his smile quirking wider.

Keith’s jacket rustled as he rolled over slightly to look at Shiro. “You… what?”

“You remember? A couple years ago. I’d never seen you before, you showed up in the commander’s office for a disciplinary hearing, and I told you --”

“You told me to stop letting my mom cut my hair,” Keith said. Even in the dark, his toothy grin was visible. “Dick.”

Shiro snorted, shaking his head. “I owe you an apology for that.”

“Why?” Keith sat up and tucked his hands between his knees, rubbing his palms together to warm them. “Because my mom’s gone, or because it was a lame insult?”

“Both,” Shiro murmured. “You were a fresh recruit, barely out of grade school. I should have been trying to help you, not haze you.”

Keith shrugged. “Sometimes you let all that top-of-the-class shit go to your head.”

Guilty, Shiro winced and nodded.

“But you always stuck by me,” Keith finished. “Even with my stupid haircut.”

Winking like starlight, several bioluminescent fish broke the surface of the water, snapping up insects in the air before retreating back into darkness. Below his palms, his lion was warm. Keith, too, radiated heat outward, and Shiro was close enough to feel it.

His right arm was cold, and its ache still gnawed incessantly at his brain, but he would survive. He always did.

Shiro reached up and tugged at a wayward lock of hair on the back of Keith’s neck. “You know, I don’t really mind your stupid haircut.”

“I don’t mind yours, either,” Keith said.


End file.
